“That’s not a fake!”
“Yeah? How can you tell, since you’ve never seen it before? Don’t worry, I’ll enlighten you.” By now, he’d memorized Lauren’s notes on the subject. “This Horus statuette from the eighteenth dynasty looks pretty good, but the weight of it tells me it’s all wrong. This should be made of wood, which weighs less than plaster. If it were made of wood, it would be dark brown all the way through. It shouldn’t show white when scratched on the bottom.” He showed him the scratch. “This faint line here, though, that’s just sloppy. It looks like a seam. Wood carvings don’t have seams. You could have at least had the self-respect to file that down.”
“You need a search warrant to be in here!”
“You let me in yourself, Vin. Anything I see in plain sight is fair game. Know what I see?” Joe clucked his tongue and shook his head. On the table was an exact replica of the Horus statuette he’d brought with him, except for the fact that the details hadn’t been painted on. He picked it up, held it next to the one he’d brought.
Escalante’s face grew redder, but he seemed to have lost his power of speech. And mobility.
Joe deposited the unfinished figure back onto a layer of newspaper, then spied the plaster mold that had been used to form it. He placed the Horus he’d brought with him into the mold and closed the two halves over it. A perfect fit. The seam Joe had pointed out earlier marked where the halves came together.
“See, Vinnie, where I come from, we call this proof.”
“You can’t prove anything.” He folded his arms in a last-ditch effort to look defiant. Confident. It wasn’t working.
On a shelf behind him, another Horus stood as if looking down upon the entire scene. Joe walked over to it and picked it up. This one felt lighter. It was made of wood. There were no seams alongthe edges. If this was the genuine artifact, Escalante was using it as a model for the fakes.
“Do you have a provenance for this?” Joe asked.
He made a break for the door.
Joe grabbed Escalante’s arm and twisted it behind him. “I’ll take that as a no. You’re under arrest for forgery and possession of goods stolen from a foreign country. Don’t add resisting arrest to your charges.” Handcuffs clicked into place.
At last.
Merry Christmas, indeed.
CHAPTER
21
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1925
Unease threaded through Lauren as soon as she saw Dr. Breasted’s return address poking out from the stack of mail. She’d asked him about the feud between her father and Theodore Clarke, but now she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Oh, how she hated conflict. She hated to have her view of either man altered by what lay inside. As Joe would say, confrontation was not her style. But truth was, aside from Joe, there was no man she trusted more than James Breasted.
Steeling herself, she dropped onto the sofa, pulled a blanket over her lap, and dove in, skimming past the opening pleasantries until she reached the part she both dreaded and needed to read.
When the tomb in KV 55 was discovered, both men claimed the credit. This type of argument was common between them. What was unusual, though, was that the clearing of the tomb was absolutely botched, and priceless treasures were the casualty.
Right away, we all saw that the condition of the artifacts within was extremely fragile. A few hours after exposure to the air, the gold inscriptions and scenes on the shrine were falling to pieces. Gold leaf peeled away and lay in drifts on the floor. Every slight disturbance in the air made it worse. Flake by flake, the inscriptionsdisappeared before our eyes. Someone sneezed in the tomb, and his handkerchief caught six pieces of ancient gold leaf. Think of it!
Theodore hired illustrators and photographers to document everything before any attempts were made to move them. But someone touched a wooden throne, and it instantly crumbled. The sarcophagus lid suffered the same fate.
Tempers ran hot. Theodore blamed Lawrence, and Lawrence blamed a dragoman, but none of the laborers had been allowed inside—a double force of guards saw to that. Theodore and I both saw bits of the ruined pieces on Lawrence’s hands and clothes, suggesting his guilt, but he denied it. Theodore suffered damage to his reputation for gross negligence in the management of the tomb. He claims that was Lawrence’s goal all along. Revenge, as it were, for taking credit for the discovery. But would any Egyptologist stoop so low? That, my dear, I cannot say. If that was Lawrence’s plan, it surely backfired, for Theodore fired him. Your father had a dickens of a time convincing another team to work with him after Theodore’s side of the story got out.
Lauren put the letter down, lifting her gaze to the Christmas tree in the corner of her apartment. She had no idea what to make of this. There had been no proof that Dad had destroyed the throne and sarcophagus, not really. Maybe he had been sifting through the rubble after it had shattered, looking for salvageable pieces.
Then again, could he simply have made a mistake by touching those artifacts and lied to spare himself humiliation?
Worse still, could years of bitterness really have driven him to do such a thing on purpose?
In any case, no wonder the two men couldn’t stand each other. Mr. Clarke had been kind to Lauren at the Met for her mother’s sake alone. Why?
Lauren blew out a frustrated sigh. She’d come to realize lately how little she really knew her parents. But since Dad had warnedher against looking into this piece of his past, she wasn’t about to bring it up to him.
Though the rest of Dr. Breasted’s letter was far more pleasant, the knots in her middle barely loosened. She reached for the rest of the mail, unfolding a thin magazine that had been stuffed into their narrow mailbox.
